1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a gateway apparatus for providing multi-channel functionality in a sensor network, and a method and an apparatus for interfacing using a serial peripheral interface in the gateway apparatus, and more particularly, to a gateway having a function of interfacing between a core network and a wireless sensor network.
The present invention is derived from a research project supported by the Information Technology (IT) Research & Development (R&D) program of the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) and the Institute for Information Technology Advancement (IITA) [project No. 2005-S-038-03, project title: Development of UHF RF-ID and Ubiquitous Networking Technology].
2. Description of the Related Art
When multi-channel functionality is applied in a wireless sensor network, one personal area network (PAN) including clustered sensor nodes can be applied so that the PAN is logically regarded as a plurality of PANs and the PANs are independently applied. When the PANs are applied using a multi-channel, the routing hop count from the sensor nodes to a sink node can be reduced, data can be reliably transmitted, and the power consumption of the sensor nodes can be reduced.
When a gateway is used to be connected to the wireless sensor network in order to apply or use the multi-channel, transceivers, which are each a wireless interface device, directly interface their respective serial peripheral interfaces (SPIs) provided by a micro controller unit (MCU) that is a signal processing unit include in the gateway. In this case, since the MCU can provide a limited number of SPIs, it is not easy to form a gateway for supporting an expanded multi-channel when a multi-channel applied to a sensor network is to be expanded. This is because other transceivers are required for expanding the multi-channel, and the transceivers can directly interface with the MCU only when extra SPIs provided by the MCU are available.
That is, since the MCU can physically provide one SPI or two SPIs, when the transceivers need to interface with the MCU, and the transceivers provide a greater number of channels than that of the SPIs provided by the MCU, a plurality of transceivers can not directly interface the SPIs provided by the MCU.